[Idle-dev] Pinging commiters about patches

[Tal Einat]

On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 11:48 PM, Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> wrote:
>
> More important is whether these dialogs have to be modal.
> Notepad++ has one non-modal box with 4 tabs, including the
> 3 windows Idle has.

Quite a few years ago I created SearchBar, a non-modal replacement for
the find and replace windows as an IDLE extensions. Besides being
non-modal, it also had great features, including highlighting all
matches and live incremental searching. It never got accepted due to
various UI issues that came up after I no longer had time to work on
it and it didn't work properly on the newer versions of IDLE.

I did spend a *lot* of work on it, especially on optimizing the search
so that incremental search and highlighting of all matches were fast
enough. I'd love to see this eventually make it into IDLE!

Note that I didn't create a replacement for the "Find in Files"
dialog; that requires showing matches in an entirely different way,
and is still often done using a modal dialog in many modern IDEs.

If anyone would like to pursue this, I'd be happy to help!


References:

Message to idle-dev in 2009:
https://mail.python.org/pipermail/idle-dev/2009-June/002767.html

Additional discussion on a related issue about a year ago:
http://bugs.python.org/issue13630

On PyPI:
https://pypi.python.org/pypi/SearchBar/

- Tal Einat